Okayyyy, these nails are absurd in the best way and I am so into them. I mean, what even is this stuff? Car paint? I follow this nail salon on Instagram called Gloss Nail Spa, which is here in LA, Silverlake to be exact, and I originally saw this look on one of their posts. I took a 2 year hiatus from the nail art game and have been sticking to the classics (aka: being boring af) for the last couple years. But this is giving me major flashbacks to my love of nail art and I’m feeling like maybe I should be revisiting that subject. Anyway, the point: When I started seeing these hologram nails I was like, HOW?? I deep creeped on the www and found that it’s done with an impossibly fine powder. There are tons of “hologram” nail polishes out there but this is referred to in the nail world as “hologram chrome powder” or “hologram mirror powder” and it’s not a regular polish. Here’s how mine were done…

Right now I have some length added onto natural my nails. I realized afterward, I kinda liked this look better on shorter nails, personally. I’ll probably do hologram again on my natural nail at some point (see how cute they are at the bottom!).

So, my nail polish was removed first. and gel polish was applied. You have to pick a base of some kind. I chose the palest pink they had because I didn’t want these to be about the color underneath. You can see down below how the base color effects the final look.

A video posted by The Beauty Department (@thebeautydept) on Aug 26, 2016 at 9:52am PDT

Next they add the powder. It’s applied with a sponge at this place but while looking on the internets I found that some people do it with those tiny old school eyeshadow sponge wands. (By the way, if you’re a pro or you are just an unofficial nail expert who knows how to do gels, here is the link to the HOLOGRAM CHROME POWDER.)

Last, the clear coat of gel is added over the top.

Here you can see a little more of their handiwork with various base colors…

This first one was done with a pale purple/lavender underneath.

This one had white underneath.

These ones have pink underneath.

These have an orange/coral color underneath. I think these might be my favorite.

These have a darker purple underneath.

And these were mine with the pale pink.

By the way, this is the same process using the “chrome” instead of the “hologram chrome”, just for your mental records!